Page 7 of The Seven Year Slip

“Well, half of my place. When Strauss and I started the company, I took over for the director of publicity and marketing as well as copublisher because we were so small, but I would not wish that on anyone else. After all, they’re notme,” she added. “Depending on your performance this summer, however, I’m inclined to put your name up for the new director of publicity. You’ve been here the longest of anyone on the team, so I only think it’s fair—not to mention I’d be an idiot not to.”

I... didn’t know what to say.

As it turned out, she didn’t expect me to say anything, as she put her glasses back on and returned to her computer. “So, you see, I imagine you’ll need to take a vacation before you start your new job—I’ll get you the name of my masseuse in the Maldives.”

My mouth dropped open. I gave a squeak. My head was spinning from all the information.

“Now, can you send me my meetings for next week? Something tells me Juliette is going to forget. Again.”

That was my cue to leave.

I prayed that my legs would work as I pushed myself to my feet. “I’ll get that right to you,” I replied, and left her office.

First, my vacation cancellation request was denied, and then Rhonda dropped that she mightretire? And I might take her place as head of thedepartment?

I didn’t want to think about it.

My cubicle was just across the hall from her door—ten feet,give or take. It was neat and pristine—the kind of space that Drew called a one-box walkout. Meaning that if I got fired, I’d need only one box to pack all my keepsakes before I left. I wasn’t planning ongoinganywhere—I’d been here for seven years—I just didn’t have much I wanted to display. Some photos, a few of my watercolor postcard paintings from around the city—Central Park’s lake, the Brooklyn Bridge from Dumbo, a cemetery in Queens. I had a bobblehead doll of William Shakespeare, and a collector’s box set of the Brontë sisters’ works, and a signed bookplate from an author I couldn’t remember and couldn’t read the name of anymore.

I sank into my chair, feeling numb and a little out of my league—for the first time in years. Retiring—Rhonda wasretiring.

And she wanted me to take her place.

My chest constricted in panic.

A few minutes later, Juliette—a petite white woman with braided blond hair, big doe eyes, and cherry-red lipstick—trudged back to her cubicle, red-eyed and sniffling. She sank down at her desk. “W-we broke up again...”

Absently, I grabbed my tissue box from under the desk and offered her one. “That’s rough, friend.”

3

Home Sweet Home

It wasn’t that Ididn’t want to take my vacation—I did. Every year for the last seven years, I’d taken that week and I’d flown off to some distant part of the world. I just... didn’t want to be the girl who kept looking around airports for a woman with an azure-blue coat and a loud laugh, waving her large heart-shaped sunglasses for me to catch up.

Because that woman didn’t exist anymore.

And neither did the girl who loved her unconditionally.

No, she was replaced by a woman who worked late on a Friday night because she could, who would rather attend work functions than first dates, who had a spare pair of tights and deodorant in her desk drawerjust in caseshe pulled an all-nighter (not that she had yet). She was always the last one in the building, when even the motion-sensor lights thought she’d gone home, and she was happy.

She was.

I finally logged out of my work computer, stood from my chair, and stretched, the fluorescent light above me flickering to life again.It was around 8:30 p.m. I should get going before security started to make their rounds, because then they’d tell Strauss and Rhonda, and Rhonda had this policy against working late on Fridays. So I grabbed my purse, made sure that Rhonda had everything on her desk for the Monday morning meeting, and left for the elevator.

I passed one of the company bookcases—the ones where people put freebies of extra galleys and final copies. Novels and memoirs and cookbooks and travel guides. Most I’d already read, but one caught my eye.

Destination Travel:New York City

It must have been a newer one, and there was a delicious sort of irony to reading a travel guide about a city you lived in. My aunt used to say that you could live somewhere your entire life and still find things to surprise you.

I thought—for a split second—that my aunt would love a copy, but when I took it off the shelf and put it in my purse, reality hit me again like a brick to the head.

I thought about putting it back, but I felt so ashamed for forgetting that she was gone that I quickly left for the elevator. I’d donate it to a secondhand bookshop this weekend instead. The lone security guard at the front of the building looked up from her phone as I hurried past, not surprised at all to find me working so late.

I walked to the subway station, and headed uptown to the Upper East Side, where I got off the train at my stop and pulled out my phone. It was a reflex by now to call my parents on the walk from the station to my aunt’s apartment building.

I never used to do this, but ever since Analea died, it’d become a sort of comfort. Besides, I think it helped Mom a lot. Analea was her older sister.

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